Will you walk a little faster?

By Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle’s new collection explores cities (London, Bristol) on foot and via inward exploration, drawing on architecture, history and personal memory. These are poems drawn from the flipside of experience, undermining and rebuilding syntax in order to precipitate language, and, in the main, abjuring punctuation. The poems also engage both with active and meditative thinking in order to establish a vulnerable and temporary equilibrium; poems more interested in framing questions than arriving at answers. The volatile and tactile realities and delusions of being in the world direct much of the language’s traffic here; there’s a commingling of sadness and wry humour in Shuttle’s travels through our physical and metaphysical worlds. Pared-back imagery and lyric purpose are embodied here throughout in the work of a poet who agrees with Ekbert Faas’s comment: ‘as soon as you have a new syntax, you have a new way of breathing, and as soon as you have that you have a new consciousness’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373546

Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, and is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove. Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012, drew on ten collections published over three decades plus new work, from The Orchard Upstairs (1980) to Sandgrain and Hour-glass (2010). This was followed by Will you walk a little faster? (2017). Her 2006 collection Redgrove’s Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. She has also published five novels, and is co-author with Peter Redgrove of two prose works, The Wise Wound and Alchemy for Women. She lives in Falmouth.